What fascinates me is how the heads of the world's biggest businesses lead their companies and deal with the personal and business pressures of being at the top. I have been a business journalist for 23 years, including working in London and New York as Associate City Editor of The Daily Telegraph. Freelance for nine years, I specialise in interviews with chief executives and other major business figures. Chairmen and CEOs interviewed include Larry Ellison of Oracle, John Chambers of Cisco Systems, Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com, Lakshmi Mittal of Arcelor Mittal, Sir Martin Sorrell of WPP, Sir Andrew Witty of GlaxoSmithkline and Oleg Deripaska of Rusal. I also interviewed 200 CEOs for a bestselling book called "The Secrets of CEOs". My second book: "Billions to Bust - and Back" was published in November 2014. You can read my interviews at Andrewcave.biz

Lady Gaga, Blu eCigs And Me: What To Do When A CEO Doesn't Mean What He Says

It’s not every day in one’s business journalism career that one comes a cropper with a global megastar with 41.6 million TwitterTwitter followers.

Then again, in 27 years of writing for newspapers, I can’t recall a chief executive that I’ve interviewed performing a swift about-face and confessing that he “mis-spoke” when he gave me an exclusive story. Until now, that is.

Here are the facts. While researching an article on the communications challenges of the new market for electronic cigarettes for CorpComms Magazine, I came across Blu eCigs – a company virtually unheard of in the UK.

The brand has only really existed here since April, when the U.S. company renamed Skycigs, a British e-cigarettes company it bought last year.

Blu got in touch too late for the CorpComms article, but I took up its offer of an interview with Jacob Fuller, chief executive of Blu Cigs UK.

It is he who has to somehow persuade the British public that they should try a brand that claims 45% of the U.S. e-cigarette market.

So an obvious question when he claimed that Blu aims to have a 50% UK market share by the end of next year was how on earth is the company expecting to achieve that.

This is what he said (I have it on tape and in a shorthand note). ‘In the U.S., Blu is working with Lady Gaga on a video with Blu in it. It’s a global video that’s going to allow us to piggyback on that brand exposure in the UK.

‘Kevin Spacey uses Blu eCigs on The House of Cards and it’s been on the David Letterman show. As those episodes make it over here, we’re getting great UK exposure from that.

‘Blu also uses actor Stephen Dorff as its celebrity spokesman in the U.S. and he came to the UK for our launch.’

An archive search revealed that the Lady Gaga connection had not been written about before. The CEO quotes stood on their own, telling the story and The Sunday Telegraph ran them in full, under the headline: ‘Blu lines up celebrities for UK assault’ and next to a picture of Gaga wearing American football body armour over a Ziggy Stardust-style leotard.’

Nice story, thought I and so did websites gagadaily.com, popreport.com, operationgaga.com and quite a few others.

The website informationsociety.co.uk ran the story under the headline: ‘Lady Gaga’s Deal to promote Blu eCigs is a Public Health Nightmare,’ while wcignewsedge.com went one further with: ‘Lady Gaga will pitch e-cigarettes to teens and other little monsters’.

Then I received an email from Resound Marketing, the PR agency that represents Blu eCigs in the US. It reads: ‘This article has caused quite a stir here in the states – and to clarify, Jacob Fuller with Blu UK mis-spoke. He did not provide accurate information, and Blu eCigs does not have any relationship or associations with Lady Gaga.’

Three days later, Blu eCigs UK pushed out a statement through its public relations agency W Communications alongside a request (declined) for a print correction.

It reads: ‘Blu eCigs regularly receives sponsorship and product placement requests and, in this instance, Jacob Fuller was mistaken regarding this comment. Blu eCigs does not have any relationship or association with Lady Gaga.’

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